Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
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NYCHA Housing New Yorkâs Flint: While Tests Showed Children Living in NYCHA Apartments Were Being Poisoned by Lead, the de Blasio Administrationâs Response was to Challenge the Tests
with
special guest, NY Times, investigative journalist, David Goodman

Mikaila Bonaparte has spent her entire life under
the roof of the New York City Housing Authority, the
oldest and largest public housing system in the
country, where as a toddler she nibbled on paint chips
that flaked to the floor. In the summer of 2016, when she
was not quite 3 years old, a test by her doctor showed she
had lead in her blood at levels rarely seen in modern New
York.


Two Thousand children living in New York City's public housing have been poisoned by lead in recent years, a shocking new report issued by the city's Department of Health reported showing how many kids younger than 18 were found with elevated levels of the toxic substance in their blood. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg! Meanwhile, the cityâs response to NYCHA children whose ingestion of lead is toxic to many tissues and organs including the bones, heart, kidneys, intestines, and reproductive and nervous systems and the brain, which is the organ that is the most sensitive to lead exposure was to deny the evidence.


While the mayor claimed at a Bronx press conference had he been presented along the way that these reports from the Department of Health that were being contested, âthat would have been the day that we started the process of turning all that around.â In fact, he had mountains of evidence âpresentedâ to him. The Daily News, for example, wrote in April 2015 about the Housing Authorityâs habit of contesting every positive lead test: When a 2-year-old whoâd spent his whole life in a Brooklyn project tested positive, NYCHA performed a test and declared the apartment lead-free. NYCHA contested 95 percent of the âpositiveâ tests it received from the city Department of Health from 2010 to 2018. As early as May 2016, e-mails obtained by The Post showed, NYCHA officials briefed top levels of City Hall that 202 children had tests showing elevated lead levels in 2010-2015. In April 2016, it was revealed that then-NYCHA chief Shola Olatoye had lied about conducting apartment inspections, which the agency had stopped from late 2012 through May 2016; de Blasio still insisted on defending her. Still new emails released by City Hall show that de Blasio apparently tried to hide the extent of the problem from the public.


Amidst these revelations, tenants are outraged. Danny Barber president of NYCHAâs citywide âCouncil of Presidents said, âHe lied. He outright lied and if it was anybody else that lied they would be locked up and put into jail. Weâre tired of it. The mayor should be held accountable.â

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